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[acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF novel The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress.] “There Ain't No Such Thing As
A Free Lunch”, often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect
of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or
at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the
signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet
newsgroups. “What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database
back end to get my address book program to work!” “Well,
TANSTAAFL you know.” This phrase owes some of its popularity to the
high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in
hackerdom (see Appendix B for
discussion).Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL (“There is No Such
Thing...”) is apparently more common, and can be traced back to 1952
in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen. TANSTAAFL may well have arisen
from it by mutation.